The meeting commenced with a viewing of several short videos
from Engineering TV - an Internet website containing several movies ranging in
topics from the DARPA Challenge to human/robotic interaction.

Following this, Nathanial brought in his new Trinity
Fire Fighting robot.He discussed
what he used to construct the ‘bot (including a Basic X microprocessor) and
that his main goal this year was speed.He then set the robot on the floor for a wall following and candle
searching demo.Very impressive!

John G. came up next reminding everyone about the new
CRS Yahoo group: CTBots which is free to join.He also discussed the possibility of setting up a poster for
the CRS at this year’s Trinity Fire Fighting Contest.

Jake was next discussing the independent project of
one of his students: Nathanial R.: a checkers playing robot.Following a brief introduction, Jake
showed everyone a video of this impressive creation in action.

Duncan was up next with a very impressive Lego and
OOPic creation.Great work!

This was then followed by Scott with a demonstration
of his senior project at RIT.Having been required to create and develop something new for this
project, Scott and his team came up with the idea to create an alert system for
USB Flash drives so that they aren’t forgotten at a public terminal.This is achieved by having the device
sound an alarm whenever the user strays to far away from the computer.Scott explained how it all worked and
gave a demo of the prototype in action.Great work Scott!

Jake came up next with a discussion of RobotBasic – a
free robotics simulator program.

Paul C. followed this with a very interesting talk on
State Machines.In his discussion
he explained to the group how they worked and what the advantages to using them
were.Thanks Paul!

The group then split up to general discussion, “Down
and Back” contest practice, and mini-sumo between Jim and Walter.